Dr. Steinmetz is Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, where she is leading a research lab at the interface of bio-inspired, molecular engineering approaches and biomedical research and materials science. Dr. Steinmetz trained at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA (AHA and NIH post-doctoral fellow), John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK (PhD in Bionanotechnology), and RWTH-Aachen University in Germany (Masters in Molecular Biotechnology). In 2011, Dr. Steinmetz was named Mt. Sinai Scholar, she is a 2009 recipient of the NIH/NIBIB Pathway to Independence Grant (K99/R00), a previous American Heart Association Post-doctoral Fellow, (2008-2009) and former Marie Curie EST Fellow. (2004-2007) Dr. Steinmetz serves on the Editorial Board of Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) and the Advisory Editorial Board for the ACS journal Molecular Pharmaceutics. Dr. Steinmetz has chaired symposia at ACS and MRS; she is the Session Chair for the Protein and Viral Nanoparticle Track at FNANO and the Chair (Co-Chair Trevor Douglas) of the Gordon Conference of Physical Virology (2015). Dr. Steinmetz has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles, reviews, and book chapters; she has authored and edited books on Virus-based nanotechnology. Research in the Steinmetz Lab is funded through grants from National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, Ohio Cancer Research Associates, American Cancer Society, and Department of Energy.

Research Statement:

The Steinmetz Lab’s mission is to push to new frontiers in biomaterials science and medicine through design, development, and testing of novel nano-scale bio-inspired materials using plant virus-based scaffolds.

Dr. Steinmetz is leading an interdisciplinary research program interfacing bio-inspired, molecular engineering approaches with biomedical research and materials science. We are devising bottom-up, bio-templated synthetic approaches toward the scalable fabrication of multifunctional assemblies for applications in:

Cancer/Cardiovascular NanoTechnology

MRI contrast agents for diagnosis and prognosis of oncological and cardiovascular diseases

drug delivery systems targeting cancer and thrombosis

cancer vaccines and immunotherapies

BioNanoScience and NanoManufacturing

self-assembled heterofunctional biomolecular materials

polymer:nanoparticle conjugates

bio-inspired tools for diagnostics and sensing

Sizing and shaping of nanostructured features with temporal and spatial control is a key opportunity to produce the next-generation of higher-performing products with diverse applications. In the medical sector, nanoparticles are advantageous (over single molecules) because their large surface-area-to-volume ratio allows functionalization with large payloads and of targeting ligands to ensure tissue-specific delivery, labels for tracking or disease imaging, and drugs or epitopes for therapy. In materials science, nanostructured materials are advantageous (over bulk material) because at the nanoscale unique properties and phenomena are observed. For example, metamaterials are those that gain their properties based on their organized structure, rather than from the materials properties of their individual components.

A quintessential tenet in nanotechnology is the self-assembly of several functional components into a single system, such as a tissue-targeted drug delivery system. Nanoscale self-assembly is a technique that nature masters with atomic precision; genetic programming provides the highest achievable reproducibility. Therefore, we turned toward the study and application of nature’s nanomaterials, specifically the structures formed by plant viruses. Plant viruses come in many shapes and sizes but most species form highly uniform structures. The production of plant virus-based nanocarriers is highly scalable and economic through molecular farming in plants. Viruses have naturally evolved to deliver cargos to specific cells and tissues; and the medical research thrust in my laboratory is aimed at understanding these natural properties for effectively tailoring cargo and tissue-specificity for applications in drug delivery and tissue-specific imaging. Furthermore, virus-based nanoparticles (VNPs) have an intrinsic propensity to self-assemble into discrete nanoparticles as well as higher-order, mesoscale assemblies; within the materials science focused research thrust, we seek to exploit these phenomena for the fabrication of novel biomolecular materials.